Virtual flight past 5,000 galaxies to oldest one: Video is made based on James Webb Space Telescope findings

On the eve of the first anniversary of the first scientific survey of the universe by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have released a three-dimensional visualization of nearly 5,000 galaxies studied by the JWST. It's a virtual flight through space to the oldest of the Maisie's Galaxy, which no one on Earth had seen before the launch of the JWST.

The video shows galaxies from a region of space called the Extended Groth Strip, located between the constellations of Ursa Major and Bootes. The Hubble Space Telescope studied this region about 20 years ago and found about 100,000 galaxies there. You could say that JWST has rediscovered them, but that wouldn't be entirely true because the most distant galaxies in the Hubble images were just dots, whereas the JWST, thanks its super-sensitive instruments, enables to see a lot of detail which are not visible in Hubble’s images.

Furthermore, the aforesaid visualization ends with a view of the Maisie's Galaxy (CEERSJ141946.35+525632.8, Maisie's). This galaxy got its name from a scientist of the project, who named it after his daughter. A NASA press release lists it as the oldest galaxy, but there doesn't seem to have been any scientific work yet confirming it in the form of spectral analysis. This is the first galaxy that humans had not seen before the JWST launch.

"This observatory just opens up this entire period of time for us to study," Rochester Institute of Technology researcher and aforementioned scientific survey investigator Rebecca Larson said in a statement. "We couldn't study galaxies like Maisie's before because we couldn't see them. Now, not only are we able to find them in our images, we're able to find out what they're made of and if they differ from the galaxies that we see close by."